Opinion: I’ll Apologize So Your Parents Don’t Have To.

Dear Incoming Student,

Welcome to Grinnell! While we haven’t met, I feel as though I’ve been introduced to you by recent news media accounts of your college generation. Do you read The New York Times? According to NYT columnist David Brooks, you and your classmates are hypercompetitive, melancholy and desperate for the stability provided by a high-paying job at JPMorgan Chase. You feel like you are the “most rejected generation” ever to exist (Brooks’s words), because your childhood was spent in the struggle for good grades, admission to good schools, participation in good extracurriculars — and sometimes you didn’t get your first choice. As a result, you want college to provide you with a guaranteed pathway to a six-figure job, a four-bedroom house, and two dogs named Fred and Ginger. And this means that you’re likely to prioritize taking classes that, in your mind, are the surefire road to financial success, and you’re likely to exclude consideration of entire areas of the Grinnell curriculum that, in your mind, are surefire guarantors of unemployment and social catastrophe.

Reading these stories, and having taught at Grinnell College for twenty-six years, I’m trying to understand what might have caused some of your generation to become such anxious, uncurious and avaricious fatalists. So far, I’ve come to the following conclusions:

It can’t be due to the fluoride in the water, since Secretary Kennedy in HHS is eliminating that (along with vaccines).

It can’t be due to the general economic climate, since the U.S. has experienced far more economic turmoil in the past.

It must therefore be due to something much closer, more intimate, and more predominant in your day-to-day existence: your parents.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I love your parents! I love the care with which they raised you. I love the concern they have for your economic and emotional well-being. I love the fact that they allowed you to go to college in the middle of Iowa. Please send them my love.

I just think that, maybe, in their desire to ensure that you have a good life, and in your desire to please them, you have internalized some ideas that ultimately will prevent you from realizing your full potential, and, in the short term, will inhibit you from taking complete advantage of all the educational resources at Grinnell College. So, on behalf of everyone between the ages of 38 and 65 (the likely range of your parents), I’d like to say: I’m sorry. Allow me to issue the following, extended apology, so that your parents don’t need to, and so that you can make the most of your life at Grinnell:

I’m sorry that you were taught that life is a desperate competition for limited resources and that only a precious few individuals will prevail. The truth is that you’re more likely to achieve happiness by collaborating with other people rather than cutting their throats.

I’m sorry that you believe that certain intellectual disciplines are less valuable to your life than others. The truth is that anything that you study at Grinnell College will help you in your career, and your major has little predictive significance: there are bankers who were Religious Studies majors, and there are doctors who studied Anthropology.

I’m sorry that you would delegate the act of thinking to a machine, so that you don’t learn how to think for yourself. The truth is that all of your heroes and the people who changed the world — Socrates, Jesus, Marie Curie, Nelson Mandela, Ho Chi Minh, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frida Kahlo, and Julie Andrews — were independent thinkers who needed to analyze information and express ideas in their own words. Grinnell provides the training to become like them: you never will if you let ChatGPT write your papers.

I’m sorry that you would avoid taking certain courses because you fear that it would hurt your GPA. The truth is that an A minus (or, horrors, a B plus!) is not going to kill your plans to attend a great law school, and most employers could care less about your GPA. Take the classes that interest you: the things you learn, rather than the grades you earn, will accelerate your future success.

I’m sorry that you would like to have the next ten years of your life planned in advance, so that you can feel reassured about your employment, housing, zip code and preschool availability for your 2.5 kids. The truth is that the future is completely unforeseeable, and it always has been — industries emerge, markets fluctuate, social practices change, democracies fall apart, your best friend has a stroke, your federal grant gets canceled, the neighboring dictator invades your country. Even if you have a parent named Nostradamus, they still don’t really know what the world will look like when you graduate from Grinnell. But we do know that a liberal arts education — a true liberal arts education — is the best way to prepare for an uncertain future and to provide you with the coping skills you’ll need when you face life’s inevitable disappointments and tragedies.

The ultimate purpose of the liberal arts is to liberate you — to free you from ignorance, prejudice and bad habits of mind that constrain your happiness. So please use Grinnell College to liberate yourself from the restrictions and expectations that make you feel like “the most rejected generation.” And, yes, that might mean liberating yourself from…your parents.